Gartner: Global Tablet Sales Growth Will Slow in 2015

January 6, 2015

By Developer.com Staff

For the past several years, tablet sales have experienced double-digit sales growth, but analysts at Gartner believe that trend is coming to an end. For 2015, they forecast tablet vendors will sell 233 million devices, only an 8 percent increase from 2014, which was itself a comparatively slow sales year.

"The collapse of the tablet market in 2014 was alarming," Ranjit Atwal, a Gartner research director, said. "In the last two years global sales of tablets were growing in double-digits. The steep drop can be explained by several factors. One is that the lifetime of tablets is being extended—they are shared out amongst family members, and software upgrades, especially for iOS devices, keep the tablets current. Another factor includes the lack of innovation in hardware which refrains consumers from upgrading."

The company expects global PC sales to increase by 1 percent to hit 321 million devices in 2015.